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Swedes Say Recycling Wastes Time And Money
Rob Parkhill writes "The London Daily Telegraph is reporting that a group of Swedish environmentalists are claiming that recycling is a waste of time and money, and most houshold waste should be burned instead."
These don't happen to be the same environmentalists that made us recycle everything in the first place, do they?
end rant
HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development
I think any environmentalist would agree that not generating waste in the first place is always preferable to recylcling. Encouraging people to think that tossing a half-full Starbucks cup into a bin is an environmental victory is counterproductive.
(Out of curiosity, why is it that questioning environmentalist dogma is only valid coming from Scandinavians?)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Don't buy crap like this.
This type "research" is frequently sponsored by corporations with an interest in attempting to sway public opinion by footing the bill for "scientific studies."
Instead, call them out on it.
PS: we've seen this stuff before
Don't be a sucker.
Not only is it a waste of time and money, but in many cases the waste products from recycling are more harmful to the environment than the thing being recycled.
In many cases there are health concerns - for example would you want recycled plastic of dubious heritage showing up in plastic sode pop bottles?
Recycling today is really driven by municipalities who are having trouble siting new landfills due to NIMBY. In reality there is no shortage of land for landfills - just plenty of politics arount their siting.
There are a few things that are being recycled sucessfully - corrugated cardboard and aluminum. However most of the rest is driven by politics rather than sound science and economics.
On a bi-weekly basis, I have to load up my truck and drive about 8 miles to the recycling center, to deposit about 20 pounds of mixed paper (mostly junk mail) and four or five cardboard boxes. Sometimes I do it monthly but SWMBO doesn't let it accumulate any longer than that.
So, I've burned one gallon of gasoline and, if the IRS is to be believed, it cost me $5.60 for mileage.
Hundreds of other families in town are doing the same thing. So, that's about two barrels of oil, and about $500 out of our pockets.
Tell me again how this is cost effective and good for the environment?
Now, for the more valuable recycleables, a truck drives down the road and picks them up from the curb. The incremental cost of getting from my neighbor's driveway to my driveway is probably $0.10, a much more reasonable solution.
Who has comments about good home incinerators?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Does this mean that I shouldn't recycle my recycle bin when I toss it out?
"If I were punished for every pun I shed, there would not be left a puny shed of my punnish head." - Samuel Johnson
"It ate itself."
Of course, we've known this for years. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an environmentalist who refuses to accept the facts. The amount of money it costs to take a piece of plastic, paper, glass or whatever and recycle it into another one is more than the cost to create that item from unrecycled material.
In Bridgeport, CT there is a plant called the RESCO, I toured it when I was in elementary/middle school (I forget). They take trash and burn it in a giant furnace, which in turn generates electricity. And the only thing you see coming out of their "smoke" stacks is steam. Very environmentally friendly, profitable and it works on almost anything that burns.
Recycling is a waste of time effort and money. The benefits to the environment from using a trash power plant vs. a fossil fuel or nuclear power plant are far greater than the benefits of say recycling paper vs. trashing paper.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
.. I should burn all that plastic instead. Sounds like a great idea. Maybe the people who performed this study inhaled some fumes from burning their plastic.
If you're a taxpayer, this isn't news. Here in Melbourne, Florida we have a mantitory waste recycling program for glass, plastic, metals and paper. Residents pay for the priveledge of sorting their junk and setting out FOUR refuse containers (three recycle bins plus their "to the landfill" bin).
If recycling was really worth the effort, the recycling companies would be paying the city for the effort and we'd be getting credits on our utility bills! If recycling was really worth the effort, recycling companies wouldn't need government mandates and subsidies to stay in business.
Global warming is good for you? Actually, man-made global warming is about as beneficial as fairies in the bottom of the garden. Before we argue over whether or not it is good, we have to first deal with the fact that there is no evidence thaat it exists.
There is an age-old argument that most littering is actually better for the environment than contributing to land fills. The logic behind it is that most litter biodegrades relatively quickly, whereas we have 80 year old meat being dug out of landfills that still show marbling and what kind of cut they were. So if you want that milk carton to biodegrade this decade, litter it. (Yes I know we have better landfill tech now, but the same logic still holds true to a lesser degree.)
So should we all start littering? No because the litter will just pile up, we make it much faster than it would decompose. In the same light I think several hundred million people's piles of trash being perpetually burned would have the Global Warming people throwing fits. We make it faster than the atmosphere can reasonably take it in. That's a heck of a lot of CO2. A volcanic eruption of extremely fine particulate matter that never ceases. El Nino Grande anyone? Don't mess with the weather.
Their argument seems logical, but so can littering seem logical. In the end it really is a Zero-Sum game. There are only so many atoms on the planet (don't pick the metiorite type nits). In the long run, reducing, reusing and recycling are the only weapons that can work in this game.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
A good analysis needs to factor in transportation costs, processing costs, whether using the recycled material requires more/less energy than using the raw material, etc. For starters, look at materials that can be truely recycled (such as aluminum cans) rather materials that are just put to another use (such as melting down HDPE bottles to make park benches).
Then somehow factor in the long term cost of using raw materials that come from non-renewable sources versus renewable sources (oil versus paper).
The problem is that an analysis that considers the multitude of materials used by modern society would be a very complicated and time consuming project. I doubt if anyone has even attempted it.
(Out of curiosity, why is it that questioning environmentalist dogma is only valid coming from Scandinavians?)
The "recycling saves Mother Earth" viewpoint was never really from the environmentalists. I remember back when recycling was first being considered in America -- the environmentalists were the only group opposed to the idea. The reason is simply that they wanted the responsibility for trash to be imposed on the corporations producing the junk rather than relying on the volunteer efforts of consumers. For the politicians, the recycling plan was absolutely brilliant. By passing it, they could convince the masses that they were doing the environment a favor. Passing the bill also kept their corporate campaign contributors very happy. And most of all, people could get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside everytime they went to the recycling center, knowing that they were doing something good, all thanks to Senator Whatshisface.
Recycling was never part of "environmentalist dogma". It was simply a very clever trick cooked up by politicans.
GMD
watch this
I don't recall anyone claiming that recycling saved time or saved money.
The claim that I've always heard (and happen to believe) is that recycling lowers the rate at which we burn through resources while reducing the volume of crap that we bury each year.
Yes, that costs more money. Yes, that takes more time. This surprises you?
Look, they are not saying we shouldn't be recycling. Recycling metals, especially aluminum, makes a lot of sense. Recycling paper from offices, where lots is generated, saves energy and resources.
But, sometimes the cost of sorting is greater than the savings. This is the case with mixed packaging (paper & plastic), and mixed color glass, and sometimes household paper. This is all they are saying. The Telegraph is trying to say they don't want you to recycle, this is not the case.
Mixed glass could be easily delt with by just recycling clear glass, and levying a $10 per lb tax on the non-recycled glass. This would encourage beer makers to use clear glass on their new brands and properly account for the added costs of the non-recycled stuff. Same thing could be done with plastics, just recycle one type, and levy a sin/sorting tax on the other stuff. And it's also not a huge loss to just burn plastics, most of it is non-toxic if burned at a high enough temperature. Those that aren't like epoxy, bakelite, teflon, etc have specialized uses (make at home, high temperature, good sealing properties and non-stick in these examples). An extra levy on these wouldn't hurt the producers unless they could be using the non-toxic stuff, in which case the levy would encourage the users to use the non-toxic stuff. Sure these taxes would hit the lower middle class disproportionately, but we could just adjust for that by raising the income tax exemption to 30 or 40 k and/or eliminating sales taxes, there is plenty of room for use taxes. Hell, you could have a $50/gallon gas tax and still make it revenue neutral by simply killing the payroll tax and raising the income tax exemption. (Not that I'm recommending such a high gas tax, that would distort the market in the other way. My point is simply that you could do it without lowering people's after tax income.)
Finally some stuff just doesn't make sense to reuse, this you can either burn or ship to a landfill in Virginia. Plastic still has a lot of hydrocarbon chains you can suck energy out of, and even household waste if properly aerated produces some methane you can combust.
Paper plates are made from a renewable resource (trees), which sounds good, but energy would be continually used to harvest the raw material and manufacture the plates. Plus throwing them away results in energy being used to transport the waste to the landfill, and then waste takes up space in the landfill. At the time I didn't consider incineration, but that undoubtably has costs, too.
Plastic plates are made a non-renewable resource (oil), which does not sound good, but it's (almost) a one time usage since the plates would be used many times. However, it takes energy to clean them (water has to be heated, automatic dishwashers use electricity, etc) and the soap may not be completely biodegradable. Plus in some areas the availability of water is an issue.
After about a day I gave up, because I had no idea where to start looking for information about the energy used for the different steps in each process. Plus I had no way to assign any type of cost/value to renewable versus nonrenewable resources, etc. I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of what initially seemed like a simple problem.
I bring this up because almost all decisions about things that impact the environment require making choices, and in most cases all of the available options have some amount of environmental cost. The problem is that there are no good sources for information that would help us make true comparisons. Instead, we are left with comparisons that are influenced by politics or ignorance (or both). As we consider new proposal about how to deal with environmental issues, we must never forget that nearly every alternative will cost something.
... The London Daily Telegraph reports that according to Swedish environmentalists global warming doesn't exist!
My grandparents had a trash burning stove right in the kitchen of their old house. They also had a brick fireplace out in the back yard used for burning bigger non-kitchen garbage. Ash and non-burnable materials were hauled to the county dump.
The county dump, incidentally, was sort of a recycling center all it's own. My grandpa often came home with more 'good stuff' he'd salvaged than garbage he'd hauled there in the first place.
However, don't try to salvage anything from a modern dump. There are thugs there (municipal employees) whose job is to make sure nobody recycles anything.
Aluminum is hideoulsy energy intensive to purify, but once its refined, its dirt cheap to remelt. ALuminum recycling is one of the few things i believe in.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
None of these people are environmentalists. One is an Ex-Government mouthpiece, a former campaign manager for Keep Sweden Tidy (former is the key word here), present occupation sounds like Waste-Management Lobbist and a bunch of waste collection companies. And their argument is purely money oriented. Waste-Collection companies find that it's unprofitable to recycle. This isn't about what's really good for the environment.
What would be best? Using less! But people won't do that. They like the convienence. They don't want to have to remember to bring a Nalgene bottle with them everywhere they go. They want to say 'Ah, I'm thirsty, and only poor people drink out of drinking fountians, and there isn't one around here anyway, so I'll plunk another dollar down for a bottle which I'll promptly throw away.
The truth of this is, recycling in the long run probably isn't cheaper, but it is better for the environment. By recycling, we keep our finite resources circulating rather than throwing things away.
So, boohoo if the waste management companies don't want to recycle. If the government is forcing these programs on waste-management, voters should support subsidies to waste-management to ensure that recycling continues.
So while it's about profit, sometimes you have to pay more to do the right thing.
The gluttony of resources at rock-bottom prices is just unrealistic. Nobody wants to pay the true price now. They just want discounted convienence by making future generations pay the price. The headline on this story is misleading.
http://www.remix.net/
I've admired Dr. Tegmark's home page since he was a grad student, not so much for the design skills (ha!) but as an exemplar of mixing serious and non-serious publications for other colleauges and onlookers to enjoy, explore, and learn from. Tegmark gets the web. As for the science, some of it I can actually understand.
At the risk of straying off-topic (hey, I gave you on-topic stuff above), I would also commend to the curious Slashdot reader a couple items I found facinating from the 'non-serious'section of his website:
a very cool diagram of "Relationships between various basic mathematical structures" from his Theory of Everything paper
and another paper addressing the question: Why does the universe have 3 spatial and 1 time dimension?
--LP
Of course, we've known this for years. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an environmentalist who refuses to accept the facts. The amount of money it costs to take a piece of plastic, paper, glass or whatever and recycle it into another one is more than the cost to create that item from unrecycled material.
The problem is the source of unrecycled material. While we have no shortage of things like metals, and while fossil fuel reserves are large, I know that here in Canada we're converting forests to wood pulp at an alarming rate, and my understanding is that the US has already mostly finished this process and is importing from us.
When the forests run out - easily within my lifetime - we'll either be stuck farming trees for lumber and wood pulp, with a manyfold increase in lumber and paper costs, or have to use recycled paper (paying more than we do now, but less than we would with tree farming as the sole source of supply).
Personally, I'd rather we used steel and concrete for building and recycle paper and keep the forests. But that's just me.
We'd still have to farm trees, as recycling would never be perfectly efficient and some applications (like food wrappings) need to be made from new material, but we'd stand some chance of halting the full-scale deforestation that's going on now.
Lastly, if we think that recycling technology will ever get better in the future, it's best to get people into the habit *now*, so that we aren't stuck trying to retrain the populace down the road.
Balogna. The result of burning garbage doesn't necessarily have to be CO2. Plasma burners yield H20 after they are finished processing the H2 and CO that come out.
If you have carbon going in, you have carbon going out.
Burn it in an oxygen-poor environment or play reforming games, and you get the carbon out as tar or particulate carbon instead of CO2 (mostly), but it still comes out.
Plasma burners or other high-temperature incinerators are also *extremely* expensive to run compared to more mundane incinerators. They're used for PCBs and other difficult-to-decompose hazardous wastes, and not much else.
Real environmentalist have always pointed out that recycling is their third choice. Reusing is their second choice. Not requiring the product in the first place is the first choice in a Conserver Society.
She's bought into the whole "save the earth" campaign hook line and sinker, and consequently always uses the super-water-saver-short-duration setting on the dishwasher. Nevermind the fact that we live in Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes, and right next to the Mississippi river. I guess that would be all fine, if the dishes actually got clean on the super-water-saver-short-duration setting, but they don't, and I have to run them a second time on a normal setting.
I guess I've come to the conclusion that most so called "environmentalists" are really about "feel good" solutions, and not ones that actually work. They don't really care about solving the real problem, just alleviating their own guilt.
AccountKiller
Background:
The Swedish' electricity saving programs has worked quite well during the last 20 years, but the use is still rising (people get computers, etc.) So any lowering of production capacity has to be replaced with fossile fuel.
The environment can't afford Swedish' environmentalists. They are ... words fail me.
(The decision of coal/nuclear was done by social democrats and environmental political parties. The report is about a report written by experts...)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
the only reason "recylcing" ever came into existence is because of our bloated asses having to use grams and grams of paper, plastic, etc to wrap things like one snickers bar.
this is not a sig.
There's currently plenty of space for landfills, and there's currently no particular shortage of raw materials. Fast forward a few decades and things might not be so convenient, at least not everywhere.
Pushing recycling now advances the state of the art. Even if the process is inefficient now, it will eventually become cleaner and cheaper, in the same way that paper recycling has. So part of every dollar we put towards recycling can be considered an investment in future technology.
I've spent my share of time with environmental groups and nobody I've known has ever thought that recycling was a panacea. Remember the three "Rs"? They're listed in order of preference: reduce, reuse, and recycle. Reducing your consumption is the best thing you can do for the environment. But if you must consume something, then maximize its use and reuse. And finally, if you've exhausted all the utility you can from something, then you recycle it, if the opportunity is available. Most environmentalists are fully aware that recycling sometimes consumes more energy and resources than it saves, but that was never the main point. The real idea behind recycling was one of behaviour modification: if you could first convince people that they should think about the environment and start recycling, then it would be easier later to get them to reuse things, and finally to not consume so much stuff in the first place. Recycling is the easier of these three thing to do, which is why most of the emphasis was placed on it. As it turns out, most people are too fucking lazy to even recycle, which is why I think there's no chance ever of getting people to reduce in a meaningful way. Some neoliberal economists have even tried to argue that increasing your consumption is good for the environment, but this is a notion too insane to bother rebutting.
Lets see through the article:
... (you get my point, I assume ;-D)
Former director-general of the government's environmental protection agency, former campaign manager for Keep Sweden Tidy, former managing directors of three waste-collection companies.
I only read former, former, former. Perhaps I am wrong, but this sounds like an assembly of exwifies howling in front of their ex`s house.
And even _if_ their arguments are rigth (wich I doubt), they have a very short-sighted point of view. They stand on the bottom of the bowl and are only capable of looking to the rim but cannot grasp that there is a wider horizon. They ignore the fact that one day there will be no oil to produce plastics, not enough wood to produce paper,
Just my 2 ct
Maresi
The checkbox said "Requires Windows 98, NT, or better. And so I installed Linux
The swedes probably have a point! The major problem in making such a statement is that it will immediately be used as ammunition by "anti-recyclers". A similar issue arose when Bjorn Lomborg wrote "The Skeptical Environmentalist", claiming that the global environment was not getting worse. In both cases the statements probably have a lot of truth in them depending on interpretation, but the damage caused in the line of policy making is detrimental. The world really do not need people who will sign a carte blanche for policy makers for a few minutes of fame.
-.sig sauer-
"Tin cans could be removed by magnets and sent for recycling"
Will wonders never cease!
-j
Do you also believe that you can do the same with $500/gallon gas tax? What is the highest gas tax that can be imposed and still be revenue neutral and not hit the lower class disproportionately? Please show your work.
Your numbers are silly. Your belief that there's a simple solution ("easily dealt with") by huge ($10/lb. tax on non-recycled glass) interference in the market is scary. "Let's pretend" economics has been imposed by ostensibly well meaning rulers in scores of countries, resulting in tens of millions of deaths.
The amount of time I have to spend seperating recycleables from trash had better be very, very small or it isn't worth ny time to recycle. The city where I live has a voluntary recycling program where you actually have to pay extra to have your recycleables picked up at the curb or else take them to a pickup station yourself. My wife does the recycling in our household. Since my opportunity cost of recycling is $100/hr, I refuse to have anything to do with it.
The city where I live used to have a trash burning municipal power plant. It was shut down a few years ago because it dumped too much dioxen into the air. The cost of building filters was way more than the electricity produced plus landfill averted was worth. There is also the question of what to do with the resulting ash which is heavily contaminated with things like lead and mercury.
FreeSpeech.org
I agree. Nuclear power is safe, cheap and clean. Further research will make it even more so. Oh how I wish I had trained to become a nuclear engineer.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
I'm gonna patent a super-duper genetically engineered bacterium/nanobot hybrid that eats anyting, turning it into a raw chemical sludge that is then reassembled by other nanobots into pure blocks of elemetary materials.
Then I can take over the world using garbage as raw material. BWUHAHAHAHAHA!
Of course there's no risk of the wee beasties escaping and eating the planet, oh no. It'll say so on the FAQ at my website.
As long as the 'wee beasties' cannot self-replicate, there's no risk of them eating the planet. Something for your FAQ I guess.
Can I buy some shares?
Two things:
Once I saw someone dump a container that held only aluminium cans straight into the regular garbage...
Also, I belive it was Durham, NC that was just throwing the recyclable items right in the landfill with everything else. I'm pretty certain this happens more than people would believe.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
The price mechanism of the free market does a terrible job of pricing many limited resources. Take oil, for instance; the price of a barrel of oil is seldom much higher than what it costs to find it, pump it, and store/deliver it. Occasionally the producers will stockpile or artificially adjust output in near-term planning, but rarely will they do this with any intention of covering long-term future shortages.
What'll happen with oil and other limited resources is that the price will stay extraordinarily low up until the moment that the shortages actually start to become obvious. If we don't do some pre-planning before we reach that point, we might have some bad times. Let's avoid that possibility by planning ahead.
Incinerating trash isn't such a bad idea. Especially if you can generate power and keep emissions down.
After all you need power anyway, and if you were going to burn something you might as well burn trash rather than burn oil.
Better to have the oil turn to plastic, then to trash, and then only burn it, than to burn it straight away.
If they can keep it as clean as a decent fossil fuel power station, why not?
Better to import your oil and wood as finished goods and burn them for energy once you're totally done with them, than to burn the oil directly.
All that talk about it being a step backwards from recycling just seems emotional not rational.
"Sends out a negative message". Tsk.